hello,
your new newbie on the block here.
I came across this piece of code,fiddled around ,deleted some lines and could'nt figure out how it worked.any good coders to decode this one?
#include <stdio.h>
main()
{
int a,b,c;
int count = 1;
for (b=c=10;a="- FIGURE?, UMKC,XYZHello Folks,\
TFy!QJu ROo TNn(ROo)SLq SLq ULo+\
UHs UJq TNn*RPn/QPbEWS_JSWQAIJO^\
NBELPeHBFHT}TnALVlBLOFAkHFOuFETp\
HCStHAUFAgcEAelclcn^r^r\\tZvYxXy\
T|S~Pn SPm SOn TNn ULo0ULo#ULo-W\
Hq!WFs XDt!" [b+++21]

for(; a-- > 64 ; )
putchar ( ++c=='Z' ? c = c/ 9:33^b&1);
getch();
}
thnks in advance and some more later!!!

well this is an example of obfuscated coding.

what this piece of code is doing is :

in the first for loop
for (b=c=10;a="- FIGURE?, UMKC,XYZHello Folks,\
TFy!QJu ROo TNn(ROo)SLq SLq ULo+\
UHs UJq TNn*RPn/QPbEWS_JSWQAIJO^\
NBELPeHBFHT}TnALVlBLOFAkHFOuFETp\
HCStHAUFAgcEAelclcn^r^r\\tZvYxXy\
T|S~Pn SPm SOn TNn ULo0ULo#ULo-W\
Hq!WFs XDt!" [b+++21]

first of all, it is assigning to 'a' a particular element in the string seen

suppose this were the line in code x=0;a="foobar"[x++ + 1];
a would assume the value = 'o'
...
in the second loop ...
a is being decremented till it is greater than 64 (ascii for 'A'),

inside putchar you see:
c being pre incremented ...and it is toggling between 32 (ascii ' ') and 33(ascii '!')

this is what is being repeated over and over to get the map of India.

hope i have been able to put some light ....

There is an annual competition for this sort of thing - the International Obfuscated C Code Contest.

http://www.ioccc.org/main.html

thanks a lot.any good resources you recommend for the language in general and the above in particular?

For C programming, the main text is "The C Programming Language" by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie.

no documentation for obfuscated coding because you're not supposed to be coding that way.

could someone recode this in a "proper" manner... that would be cool!

thanx a lot guys,hope them obfu... coders die a horrible death in debugging hell!!!!